LATIN LANGUAGE, The. One of the Indo-European family of languages, spoken in Latium and especially in Rome; and extended with the Roman rule over the ancient world; the source from which the Romance languages (Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese) are de rived.
As one of the Indo-European languages Latin shows a relationship in vocabulary, in inflected forms and in syntactical structure to other branches, Greek, Sanskrit, Germanic, Slavic, but according to the theory now gener ally accepted this indicates linguistic relation ship only and does not necessarily imply an ethnological connection between the races spealcing these languages. It was long held that the resemblance between the Greek and the Latin was so close as to warrant the belief that the two languages (and races) were de rived from a common stock, but this theory (of a Graxo-Italian unity) is now generally abandoned. Probably the closest connection of Latin is with the Celtic languages.
Latin was one of a group of dialects spoken in central Italy. The other best known and most closely related Italic dialects are the Faliscan (which is scarcely more than a local variety of Latin) and the Osco-Umbrian. The latter was an extensive family of dialects spoken in the mountain districts of central Italy, especially in Samnium, and in early times was more widely distributed than the Latin and of at least equal advancement. The Oscan is represented by a number of inscriptions, of which the Tabula Bantina is the longest, and the Umbrian by the Iguvinian Tables, of some 4,000 words in length.
The Latin language was reduced to writing at an early period by the use of an alphabet derived from the Greek alphabet of the town of Qum. Of this earliest period we have scanty records in inscriptions from about 500 B.C. down (the Fibula of Palestrina, the Duenos inscription) and in the rituals of the Salii and the Arval Brethren. These were not wholly intelligible to the Romans of the classical times and are still in part obscure; but enough is clear to show that the language was at that period a raw dialect of limited vocabulary, in capable as yet of expressing the thoughts or emotions of a highly civilized people.
The change from a rustic dialect to a lit erary language took place in the 3d and 2d centuries B.C. It was brought about by two causes. In the first place, through the exten sion of Roman power over the whole of Italy, Latin became the language of trade and of offi intercourse throughout the peninsula; in this process' of expansion the language reflected the expanding interests and necessities of the people who spoke it, becoming by use richer in vocabulary, more varied and at the same time more regular in structure, and gaining by its contact with the Oscan and Umbrian. This process was aided also by the constant practice of oratory, which the workings of a free con stitution called forth. In the second place, the contact with the Greeks of southern Italy gave an immense and lasting stimulus to literary production. At first this took the form of the drama and the epic, and the necessities of verse, particularly of the Greek hexameter, re quired a conventional distinction between long syllables and short, such as the native rhythms, which were mainly accentual, had not required. The quantitive character thus given to the lan guage and the imaginative enrichment which came from its employment in poetry affected chiefly the language of literature. On the other hand, in the spoken Latin, the giving up of the Indo-European accentuation and the adoption of a new accent-law, by which the main accent was restricted to the penult and ante-penult, resulted in the frequent shorten ing of the unaccented final syllable, especially in iambic words, and in the occasional dropping of final consonants.. Acting in different di rections, as a conservative force in the literary Latin, as a cause of rapid change in the spoken language, these influences produced the begin ning of that separation between the language of books and the speech of the common people, which, though it occurs to some degree in all languages, is a most marked peculiarity in the development of the Latin language.